IRIS Nebula LRGB

Iris Nebula LRGB   L=220min  R=100min  G=85min  B=200min Taken with William Optics 80mm and DSI III camera

Today we bring you news about events around town regarding the cloud.

Dec. 8, 2009
First up — we already told you about FedScoop’s Cloud Computing Shoot Out. It’s their second event that will focus on U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra’s five pillars of transparent government. This time, panelists will address concerns related to issues surrounding cloud portability, interoperability and security.

Some of the attendees:

• Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon.com
• Yousef A. Khalidi, Distinguished Engineer, Cloud Computing, Microsoft Corporation
• Michael G. Hill, Vice President, Enterprise Initiatives IBM
• Prasad L. Rampalli, Vice President, Intel Architecture Group, Intel Corporation
• Eran Feigenbaum, Director of Security, Google Enterprise
• Kaveh Vessali, Vice President of Public Sector Solutions, Salesforce.com
• Jeff Bergeron, Chief Technologist, U.S. Public Sector, HP

The Shoot Out will be held at the Newseum and starts at 8 a.m. Register here.

Dec. 9, 2009
The Digital Government Institute presents its Cloud Computing Conference.

Chris Kemp, Chief Information Officer, Ames Research Center, NASA, will deliver the keynote, Government Cloud Computing for 2010: Moving Towards Efficient Operations.

Also, Chris Dorobek of DorobekInsider and Federal News Radio’s Daily Debrief will moderate the panel How to Take Advantage of Cloud Computing Today.

You can register for it here.

Dec. 17, 2009
Also, AFCEA Bethesda Chapter presents IT Infrastructure Management as part of its monthly breakfast series.

The panel will focus on how cloud computing environments, such as NASA’s Nebula and DISA’s Rapid Access Computing Environment (RACE), are changing the landscape of government IT infrastructure management, as well as helping to streamline system, network and storage management.

Speakers include:

• Casey Coleman, Chief Information Officer, General Services Administration (moderator)
• Chris Kemp, Chief Information Officer, NASA Ames Research Center
• Alfred Rivera, Director, Computer Services Directorate, Defense Information Systems Agency
• Keith Trippie, Executive Director, Enterprise System Development Office (ESDO), Office of the Chief Information Officer, Department of Homeland Security
• Pete Tseronis, Associate Chief Information Officer, Department of Energy

Register here.

FCB will, of course, attend all of these events and report back, just in case you can’t make it.

What do you see in this image?  Last weekend, readers of this blog theorized about the image to the left, and came up with some beautiful ideas.  An intergalactic butterfly, a space angel, two black holes meeting, looking through the tail of a comet, cosmic mitosis, a speeding galaxy, two stars kissing, star fish kissing, space fish kissing, and a space hourglass were just some of the ideas that also included nebulae, explosions, and (more than once) a mammogram (oh, context is everything, isn’t it, my friends?).

I was overcome by the beauty in your ideas, and the freshness with which you saw this image, which is at once so powerful and yet now almost commonplace in the wealth of detail-rich images that we now routinely get from the Hubble Space Telescope.  Such intricate images are now released regularly … so regularly that they rarely even make the paper.

But really … isn’t it beautiful?

It looks so fragile, so sweet, so … lovely.  You could hang it on your wall. I wonder if it would shock you to hear that this lovely filagree is actually a tremendous explosion of gases from a dying star 3,800 light-years away.  The star, once about five times as big as our Sun, has grown and expanded to many times its size, just as all stars its size and temperature do, until it is as wide as a thousand Suns, all lined up as if they were waiting in line for a once-in-a-lifetime event.  And in fact it is.  The picture you see above is a snapshot of a moment in time during the very death of the star at the center.

The cosmic hourglass you see there is not sheer, but in fact “roiling cauldrons of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit….tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour—fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in 24 minutes!”  The gases are cast off in layers, taking shapes that tell us about the conditions under which they were shed, and these cast-off gases have begun to glow, basking in the stream of ultraviolet radiation in which the dying star bathes its surroundings, giving them the ultimate in sunburn, next to which our reddened skin would pale.

We can learn a lot from this picture.  The Hubble scientists tell us:

The WFC3 image reveals a complex history of ejections from the star. The star first evolved into a huge red-giant star, with a diameter of about 1,000 times that of our Sun. It then lost its extended outer layers. Some of this gas was cast off from its equator at a relatively slow speed, perhaps as low as 20,000 miles an hour, creating the doughnut-shaped ring. Other gas was ejected perpendicular to the ring at higher speeds, producing the elongated “wings” of the butterfly-shaped structure. Later, as the central star heated up, a much faster stellar wind, a stream of charged particles traveling at more than 2 million miles an hour, plowed through the existing wing-shaped structure, further modifying its shape.

All that, my friends, and much more, from a picture.  An image.  A snapshot that three guys — let’s call them Keith, Howard, and Bruce — took one day with our planet’s most amazing camera, a camera that can see into the far depths of outer space.

The birth of a baby is one of the most amazing miracles to behold in the natural world. From conception to birth, the change that a baby endures beginning as a single cell and ending up as a full grown and functioning human being in the short span of forty weeks is unrivaled in nature. Stellar birth, however, is also an extremely amazing event. Although the birth of a star takes an eternity in comparison to the human gestational cycle, it is one of the most amazing processes that occur within the celestial realms. One place where the birth of stars occurs is within dark molecular clouds called Bok Globules.

A pair of Bok Globules

Bok globules are dark, dense clouds of dust and gas found within H II regions, which are low density clouds of gas and plasma that can be as big as several hundred light-years in diameter. These Bok globules typically have a mass that ranges between 0.1 and 2000 solar masses, a unit of astronomical mass measurement that is equal to the mass of the Sun.  They are contained with an area of about a light year or so in diameter. Molecular hydrogen, carbon dioxide, helium, and a small percentage of silicate dust are found within these clouds.

These astronomical phenomena where first observed by astronomer Bart Bok in the 1940s. Bok and his researcher partner E.F. Reilly published a paper in 1947 that stated these clouds were similar to the cocoons of insects. They hypothesized that these clouds were undergoing gravitational collapse to form protostars from which star clusters and star systems were formed. This hypothesis was difficult to verify due to the fact that the clouds obscure all visible light being emitted from within the cloud. However, infrared analysis observations published in 1990 confirmed that stars were being formed within the Bok globules.

Bok globules are the smallest manifestations of dark nebulae, which are interstellar clouds that contain a very high concentration of dust that allows them to scatter and absorb visible light. Bok globules support both the inflow and outflow of material, a process common in the development of protostars. These clouds are known to have a temperature of around 10 Kelvin.

Bok globules are still being intensely researched and their inmost properties are still being analyzed. While there is still much information to be garnered from Bok globules, what is known is that they actually serve as a cocoon protecting infant protostars from being stripped by radioactive stellar winds from other nearby stars and the block all visible light. Bok globules are an amazing phenomena and the understanding of these clouds will give us an even greater insight into the birth of stars.

References

http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/cms/astro/cosmos/B/Bok+Globule

http://www.universetoday.com/2009/02/02/journey-inside-a-bok-globule/

Two new fine art photos have been added to the image gallery at Mark Stout Photography: Life Force and Gateway to Hell.  These are renditions of the power of the spirit and his descent into hell.  Features male fitness model Joshua Maliszewski.

Fine Art, Corporate Art - copyright Mark Stout

Corporate art, fine art - copyright Mark Stout Photography

A new fine art photo featuring model Joshua Maliszewski has been added to the fine art sections of Mark Stout Photography.  Entitled “Life Force” it represents the power of the spirit within…

Life Force, a fine art photo - copyright Mark Stout

After my recent trip back into the realm of the “canon” Trek, it’s time to return once more to my own weird Trek Universe. 

Ursula K. Le Guin należy do najwybitniejszych pisarek literatury science fiction i fantasy. Wiele razy była nagradzana największymi nagrodami literackimi: Hugo i Nebulą. Dlatego z niekłamaną ciekawością zabrałem się za jedną z jej najbardziej znanych książek należących do cyklu Ekumena pt. “Lewa ręka ciemności”.

Powieść osadzona jest we wspomnianym świecie Ekumeny. Akcja ma miejsce na niezbadanej wcześniej planecie, w świecie Gethen, przez miejscowych zwanym Zimą. Przybywa tu wysłannik Ekumeny o imieniu Genly Ai. Ma za zadanie przekonać mieszkańców Gethen do przyłączenia się do wspólnoty. Ląduje on w kraju Karhid, gdzie wzbudza wielkie zainteresowanie, a jego statek kosmiczny zostaje rozebrany na części i poddany badaniom. Genly rozpoczyna swoją misję i szybko wplątuje się w liczne intrygi pałacowe, gdyż każdy chce wykorzystać jego obecność dla własnych celów. Potem trafia do kraju Orgoreyn, który stanowi zupełne przeciwieństwo Karhidu, ale czy lepsze?

Ten krótki rys fabularny jest tylko ułamkiem tego co znajdziecie w powieści. Przyznam, że pomimo faktu, iż akcja nie jest tak dynamiczna jak w Wiedźminie i Achai, które m. innymi z tej racji tak przypadły mi do gustu, to “Lewą rękę ciemności” czyta się z równie wielkim zaangażowaniem i zainteresowaniem. Nie obędzie się bez tzw. syndromu “Jeszcze jeden rozdział i idę spać”, który potrafi trwać nieprzerwanie przez całą noc

Czym oprócz doskonałych intryg może nas jeszcze zainteresować powieść Ursuli K. Le Guin. Przede wszystkim opisem świata i mentalności jego mieszkańców. Otóż różnią się dosyć znacznie od Genly’ego, urodzonego na Ziemi. Są hermafrodytami, czyli obojnakami, którzy jedynie w pewnych okresach stają się płodni i przyjmują jedną z płci – męską lub żeńską. Początkowo opisy kemmeru (okresu godowego) wywoływały u mnie delikatny uśmiech politowania, ale z czasem autorka tak fachowo nakreśliła powiązania pomiędzy polityką, a kemmerem, że w mojej wyobraźni powstał obraz społeczeństwa zupełnie innego od naszego (jednak z pewnymi podobnymi cechami, przywarami i zachowaniem, które już sami musicie sobie doczytać), ale w pełni funkcjonalnego, obdarzonego swoimi tradycjami i religią. Szybko udało mi się wejść w skórę Genly’ego i tak jak on zagłębiać się w poznawanie nowego świata.

Mój ulubiony etap? Przejście przez lodowiec. Jeżeli polityka i rozdziały dotyczące przypowieści, kronik, stanowiące uzupełnienie do ogólnego obrazu Zimy Was nie interesują, to te kilka mroźnych rozdziałów powinno Wam się spodobać bez dwóch zdań. Ja osobiście byłem oczarowany szczegółowością opisów śniegu i lodu oraz relacji pomiędzy osobami przemierzającymi ten niedostępny krajobraz. Przysłowie, że najlepszego przyjaciela poznajemy w biedzie nigdzie jeszcze nie miało tak realnego znaczenia. Gorąco polecam!

pozdrawiam,
pit

Aliette de Boddard has been doing some research and it turns out that Interzone stories are eligible for the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America’s annual Nebula awards. This is because they are published online by Fictionwise. This should also apply to other magazines and publications that are available online, such as Jupiter, Dark Horizons and so on.

Feel free to nominate and vote if you’re a SFWA member…

I reworked the signage and textures on this ship the other day.  I like the way my most recent Enterprise model turned out, so I redid the textures for my “Phase II” Constitution-class to match the textures for the TOS Enterprise.  After all, I figure this is a Constitution-class variation from the 2260s, possibly built a few years before the refit of the Enterprise for TMP, and before they’d completely worked out the ConstitutionII-class (or Enterprise-class, if you prefer) from the movies.  Anywho, I finally got around to rendering some images of it yesterday.  I’ve always been a fan of this design, which is why I had to build one a few years ago. 

Banner Tutorial

OUTCOME

Por aero

1º Passo

Vamos começar preenchendo todo o fundo do documento com a cor 2c2c2c. Depois crie uma nova camda e aplique alguma Pattern Pequena e bem padronizada em overlay com opacidade pro volta de 50%. Apague ela um pouco e siga para o próximo passo:

2º Passo

Coloque dois shapes triangulares de forma a preencher todo o documento, um embaixo e outro emcima. Mude a cor de um para cinza e a cor do outro para cinza claro, diminua a opacidade ao seu gosto e acrescente alguns brushes também com opacidade reduzida.

3º Passo

Adicione alguma stock de nebula e comece com a tipografia (os styles usados podem ser vistos na PSD no final do post).

4º Passo

Continue com a tipografia, lembresse qe se deve ter criatividade, só socar uma fonte não vale quando você quer realmente se destacar.

Ache algo que expresse um pouco do que o banner quer passar e personalize a tipografia conforme sua imaginação:

5º Passo

Para mudar o tom do verde, que eu achei feio, adicionei um PhotoFilter Vermelho em Clipping mask. Nessa parte tentei deixar com um aspecto um pouco “web 2.0″ acrescentando um shape com opacidae em 40% em clipping mask.

6º Passo

Para finalizar coloquei alguns brilhos e adicionei uma borda fina.

FINAL:

Espero que tneham gostado =D

PSD: Ned Banner

Here’s where they come from!